The Serpent's Wisdom

Seen in nola_view

Since so many homes were destroyed, the natural inclination is to build safer or perhaps impregnable structures. But that is the wrong response. No one should or will rebuild or insure expensive homes on vulnerable ground, such as the devastated Ninth Ward. And it is impossible to make homes perfectly safe against every conceivable act of nature.

Instead, the city should help create cheap housing by reducing legal restrictions on building quality, building safety, and required insurance. This means the Ninth Ward need not remain empty. Once the current ruined structures are razed, governmental authorities should make it possible for entrepreneurs to put up less-expensive buildings. Many of these will be serviceable, but not all will be pretty. We could call them structures with expected lives of less than 50 years. Or we could call them shacks.

What is the advantage of turning wrecked wards into shantytowns? The choice is between cheap real estate or abandonment. The land will not sustain high-rent, high-quality real estate.

from An Economist Visits New Orleans

In other words, it's okay to build disposable homes for disposable (i.e. poor and black) people. Naturally people can live and thrive in disposable communities, because people can live and thrive without trying to build a lifetime of possessions and memories in a place where they love to live.

This is the face of economics which i hate the most: the kind which treats all topics as numbers without considering that there is human grief, toil, and happiness behind them.

The New York Times printed an article on an internal Wal-Mart memo on the impact of healthcare costs on their bottom line.

Does the memo advocate pressing Congress to reign in Big Pharma's greed? No, out-of-control medical inflation is accepted as a matter of course. Does the memo advocate opening a national dialogue on the social factors causing Americans to be increasingly unhealthy? No. Why? Because there is an implicit understanding among the people at the upper echelons of the corporate ranks that the status quo is far too profitable to risk shaking it up. If we as a society look deeply and honestly into the things that are making us unhealthy, we might find that ways of doing business have to change. Their collective avoidance of these issues means shoving off more and more of the costs onto the middle and lower classes, while grabbing more and more of the benefits. This is part of the pattern which i call Cannibal: the slow-motion consumption of one group of humans by another.

And now, here's yet another piece of proof that this is not accidental, a battle-plan in a kind of warfare that most of us were unaware is being waged. Wal-Mart's board of directors knows that Wal-Mart is large enough to impact the way healthcare costs are distributed in society, and that their decisions will influence the ways other companies do business (because, you know, they have to stay competitive, or the almighty Profit God will frown upon them.) So if these measures are taken, others will follow suit -- the old familiar oligarchical collectivism at work.

(The logic fueling the capitalist "race to the bottom" would also apply in reverse, if people were actually valued; if everyone did business in a humane way, no one's share of the profits would be hurt. So when government has taken measures to force a humane minimum standard, such as a minimum wage or a 40-hour work week, businesses have always continued to make a profit. This despite stockholders' bellyaching that labor standards would hurt their bottom line; their typically myopic point of view fails to consider that when everyone is doing the same thing, it is not a competitive disadvantage.)

The memo's author, Wal-Mart's Executive Vice President for Benefits, uses employee satisfaction surveys to help determine where costs can be cut. High satisfaction means that Wal-Mart is being too generous. Overall, she treats the needs of Wal-Mart's employees as a burden. I literally get the impression, reading this, that she barely thinks of employees as people. They are numbers, and where those numbers dip they cut into stockholder's profits. She laments that less healthy employees are more likely to stay with the company. By "less healthy employees" she mainly means fat people, who "common sense" says are to blame for their own health issues because we all know that being fat is entirely due to poor choices and not, say, the fact that many people are getting filthy rich selling addictive and unhealthy foods -- although her analysis would impact anyone with a chronic illness or a disability, or a sick child or parent. Sheesh, loyalty to an employer used to be rewarded; now you get a kick in the teeth.

The memo also complains about "well-funded, well-organized critics," as if the labor unions were actually some kind of threat with real political clout. Do the corporate bigwigs feel oppressed by our needs to be treated as human beings? Aww.

Well, enough commentary; read the memo for yourself [pdf]. Some selected excerpts:

( Read more... )

You. Yes, you, reading my blog.

If you found yourself utterly penniless and without resources, would you be able to survive? I know some of you have already been there and survived it, or are surviving it now. Myself, i've never been quite penniless; i have been through times where i had $10 to last me a week, and i've been through extended rough periods of extreme bill-juggling, and still live basically paycheck to paycheck, but i've never been without resources. I've never been homeless.

I've been close enough to destitute, though, at times that i feel i have some idea how rough it would be to face life with no resources and no prospects.

So, picture this. You have no money. You own maybe a few changes of worn-out clothes and a few other personal effects. You have no training and no education. You were malnourished as a child (which is known to cause lifelong neurological problems) and were probably exposed to pollutants spewed out by some nearby factory. You have a kid who's starving. What would you do?

Start your own business? For that you need money. But who is going to give you money? Maybe someone in your family. But everyone in your family is as dirt-poor as you, or they are just scraping by in their own way. Maybe you could scrape together enough money to buy a mop and a bucket and a uniform and farm yourself out as an enterprising entrepreneur. That is, if you can find someplace which doesn't already have its janitorial needs covered.

Get a job, so that you can save up the money to start a business? People who have been homeless or destitute have told me of the immense hurdles they have to jump just to be able to find work. You have to have decent clothes. You have to have a permanent address. You have to have ID. You have to have people skills. You have to find an employer who is relatively unprejudiced against you. You have to be willing to suffer all kinds of indignities at the hands of supervisors who know you are entirely replaceable.

This scenario, of course, has left out the kind of misfortune that strikes worst against those who are the most resourceless. If you get sick, or your kid gets sick, you lose your job (you are that replaceable) and go back to square one. You can have your money planned out perfectly, only to have your secondhand car break down or your glasses break or your kid's school uniform prices go up. You can lose your job at any time. In my own experience, these unplanned calamities are what primarily makes it difficult to make lasting improvement in your life when you're down.

Those who have never faced that kind of adversity have no idea how challenging it is just to get by, much less to make improvements in one's life. They can't imagine being without backup resources like school or family. School? That has to be paid for somehow. Government assistance? Incredibly bureaucratic (you have all your papers, don't you?), undignified, and disempowering -- and frequently taken away from you at random even once you've been approved for it. Family? Having no family to call on for help is a huge factor -- which is why a disproportionate number of homeless people are queer.

It can take sustained assistance from a friend or family member for over a year to be able to climb out of the pit once you're completely down.

It is true that some people "climb out" of destitution and make a decent life for themselves. But in the United States there is a total lack of appreciation for the obstacles people face when they are truly destitute. It is acceptable and even traditional to blame those who don't have the luck to avoid calamity, who don't have family to call for help, when they are unable to weather severe adversity. (Never mind that in fact poverty in this country is expanding, not contracting; more and more of us are buckling under to the shocks of adversity.)

One in four Americans blame the poor of New Orleans for their predicament after Hurricane Katrina. One in four.

So, still imagining that you are destitute? Perhaps you've managed to get a roof over your head and have a little cash for food every week. Now imagine that you live in New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina is coming your way. You have $10 in your pocket, and no car. One of your friends has a car, but wants you to help pay for gas. Okay, great. Where are you going to go? You don't have the money for a hotel. So you're going to leave behind what little you've scraped together to go sleep in a ditch in North Louisiana? You go to your friend's house to find they've taken the car and left.

Fast forward two weeks. You don't know where your kid is, the two of you were separated during the evacuation. You waded through flood water for two hours, past floating corpses, and are now severely dehydrated. Some of your friends didn't make it; they're dead. You were shot at by Jefferson Parish deputies trying to walk out of the hellhole your city had become. Then you hear that one in four of your "fellow" American citizens think you are responsible for your own predicament.

If you lived in Cuba instead, there would have been provisions to get you and your kid safely out of the lowlands. You would not have been told by people around you that adversity is your own fault. So, alright, living in Communist Cuba you'd have other problems, but at least your society cares about you enough to get you out of the way of a frickin' hurricane.

Not so in the "land of the free," where it's perfectly okay to leave poor people to die.

Warning: utilitarian ethical argument follows!

My thoughts today are on the efforts of governments and charitable agencies to "rescue" people from poverty, prostitution, and drug addiction. First up, is this post in feminist about unionized sexworkers in Brazil, and their allies' rejection of US anti-AIDS funds that would have come with strings attached. Secondly, I have in mind a recent study conducted in the Netherlands which found improvements in the lives and health of heroin users if they are able to obtain prescriptions for heroin. Lastly, a recent report on NPR discussed a proposed law in New York that would treat teenage prostitutes not as criminals but as victims.

The goal of a social amelioration program, be it one that aims to help poor people pay their rent and feed their children, or one that aims to help women and children escape if they have been trafficked, and so on, should ultimately be to improve the lives of those involved and to improve the state of society as a whole.

All too often, these programs involve ideas promoted by educated "experts" who have an ideological agenda. That agenda might be liberal or conservative, but either way it comes at the problem with a pre-determined answer to the problem. From ideology to proposed solution, the expert frequently does not see the need to consult with poor people, prostitutes, drug users, etc. to ask them what THEY need or want. Or, even worse, they may have formed the opinion that 'targets' (I am calling them such where they are objectified) of aid programs are intractable, by seeing their resistance to existing aid programs.

Consequently, they throw up their hands in frustration when the targets of their proposed solution avoid participating or complain about its uselessness. "Don't they know what's good for them?" Others (usually conservatives) then point to the futility of throwing money at the problem in the first place.

Social amelioration is rarely driven by true compassion, which implies the willingness to set aside your ideology and listen to people. If the experts listened to poor people, prostitutes, drug users, and so on, they'd find out that what they want and need are options and empowerment.

Empowerment doesn't mean imposing your idea of a roadmap from here to there. Empowerment doesn't mean, "Stop doing X, Y, and Z right now, or else we won't help you!" Empowerment means recognizing that when one lives in an environment of endemic exploitation and limited resources, different life decisions make more sense.

Essentially, from the point of view of those who are the targets of social amelioration programs, the aid workers insist that they stop doing something that makes sense to them, something which has enabled their survival, and do something else instead that may not make as much sense, and continually jump through numerous hoops in order to prove they are "worthy" of a handout. There is nothing empowering about going through a social aid program; on the whole, they add to, rather than subtract from, the indignity of one's life. It typically means less options too, because one has to order one's life around doing what is acceptable by the (essentially alien) morals of the aid workers.

Needle exchange programs, distribution of free condoms, and other similar programs considered "morally shaky" by the mainstream 'malestream' are effective because they do not involve demands, and they provide something that is actually helpful and needed. Thus they seem more like real compassion; and they are therefore more likely to engender trust and willingness to participate among those whom aid workers wish to help.

Only in the way of compassion in general is there any real hope of convincing someone across a "social divide" that your view makes the most sense.

The issues of poverty, drug use, prostitution, and so on, are complex and do not have a "quick fix" of the sort that the American public seems to insist upon. To "rescue" someone from these ways of life does not mean simply intruding into their lives and imposing your view; your view is the normative one only where you come from.

A button I picked up this weekend sums it up nicely: Poverty is a weapon of mass destruction.

I can't think of a better way in which this has been demonstrated than the use of poor people as unwitting subjects in medical experiments.

The most recent example is the use of foster children (without their consent or knowledge) in experiments on AIDS medicines.

Government-funded researchers tested AIDS drugs on hundreds of foster children over the past two decades, often without providing them a basic protection afforded in federal law and required by some states, an Associated Press review has found.

The research funded by the National Institutes of Health spanned the country. It was most widespread in the 1990s as foster care agencies sought treatments for their HIV-infected children that weren't yet available in the marketplace.

... Several studies that enlisted foster children reported patients suffered side effects such as rashes, vomiting and sharp drops in infection-fighting blood cells as they tested antiretroviral drugs to suppress AIDS or other medicines to treat secondary infections.

In one study, researchers reported a "disturbing" higher death rate among children who took higher doses of a drug. That study was unable to determine a safe and effective dosage.

It would be horrible enough if this were an isolated case. But no -- we also have:

• The Tuskegee Syphilis experiment, wherein the US Public Health Service allowed almost 400 black men to die slowly of syphilis while monitoring for years the effects of the disease on their bodies.
  
• Several experiments on soldiers (the "Atomic Veterans") and black people to examine the long-term effects of radiation exposure.
  
• In 1966 researchers from Fort Detrick conducted experiments on the spread of airborne bacteria in the subways of New York and in other places.
  
• In the early 1990's, several public health departments pushed Norplant -- birth control implants -- on their patients, especially poor women of color. Many of the women who had severe problems with Norplant had a great deal of trouble having it removed. Some judges even began ordering women to have Norplant inserted -- even after it became obvious that Norplant was a public health menace.
  
• And there are many more examples.

Where's the outrage over this? Where's the outrage over Bhopal and agent orange and lead in inner city soil? High profile cases of animal abuse get more outrage.

Here's where I think the outrage went: I think that at some point, each of us recognized (on a non-conscious level) the evil and dehumanizing nature of the society in which we live, realized there was little we could do about it, and became numb to it. We came to recognize the sublimated cannibalism of social stratification and understood that it was eat or be eaten. The media report on a thousand ways in which the poor and disadvantaged are preyed upon and we turn a blind eye, because we know (again, on an unconscious level) that our gratification comes from the teats of Empire.

A week or so ago, I addressed what saw as a flaw with most political and economic systems -- the fact that they presume an "even playing field" for all people. They cannot account for the fact that people have disabilities or social disadvantages of other sorts, that prevent them from having the same level of access to the free market as the "average" person.

It seems to me that without some kind of centralized guidance, there is no way to even attempt to maintain at least a baseline level of fairness for people with disadvantages. Without that baseline level of fairness, the stage is set for unchecked exploitation and oppression.

Here's a real world example, which has affected people close to me.

Although childhood lead exposure has diminished over the past 20 or so years, the problem has by no means been solved. Rather, the demographics have shifted. Some groups, mainly minority and poor children living in the inner city, suffer from high rates of lead poisoning. Over 50 percent (some studies place this figure at around 70 percent) of children living in the inner cities of New Orleans and Philadelphia have blood lead levels above the current guideline of 10 micrograms per deciliter (micrograms per deciliter).

This a perfect example of how one disadvantage piles onto another, because we do not have the level playing field presumed by many political philosophies. Unless the unfairness is addressed in some way, the political system is unethical.

According to the article, children have lead poisoning due to exposure to soil contaminated with lead. Lead currently in the soil of certain inner cities is an externality of automobile usage before leaded gasoline was phased out 20 years ago. Though we have removed the contaminant, the poison remains.

Lead poisoning is a horrible affliction, and the costs of it are borne mostly by the poorest people in society. But no economic cost is truly isolated; the costs of this affliction ripple out and affect everyone in society. Every cost in an economy has mass which warps the economy around it. In short, this is your problem too; even if you're not directly affected, the cost of it reflects in the prices you pay for health care and environmental maintenance.

But how is it going to be fixed? The free market is not going to do anything about this, and wouldn't have done anything to stop the use of leaded gasoline in the first place. There is no one to hold accountable, because virtually all of us participate in the automobile culture. The costs fall to all of us, though, so in the case of public externalities like this, it makes sense to manage the costs centrally and handle them via government intervention.

If you have any better ideas, etc. etc.

Debt has become the engine driving the American economy -- from skyrocketing national debt, the strong dollar and record trade deficits, and social security -- to household "survival debt" (using funds from credit cards, student loans, payday loans, home equity loans, etc., on household needs like groceries, gasoline, or rent payments).

The most powerful and prosperous nation in the world has become a huge pyramid scheme.

The ones who pay are those who are unable to maintain "good credit," or in other words those who are economically disadvantaged (due to race, religion, gender, or especially illness or disability) or who are just less savvy. Lose a job, have a major injury or illness, or live in a redlined zip code, and you will pay higher interest rates. A portion of people with bad credit are just less responsible, but not as many as you might want to believe, and to a large degree their irresponsibility is encouraged by a lack of consumer education, lender hype, and advertiser-driven conspicuous consumption memes ("Retailers worry whether this holiday season will match up to previous years. You, yes you there with the remote control. Help the economy! It's your Duty^TM. Buy lots of stuff for Christmas, and be sure to pay on credit at 19.99 APR!").

So far I've been unable to find hard statistics about "survival debt" in American households. Of course Congress did not seriously examine this when the "two parties" worked together to fast-track a bill to make it harder for the economically disadvantaged to escape the burdens of their credit card or medical bills. But it is clearly on the rise:

The picture of debt in this country mirrors the trend toward greater economic inequality. During the boom of the 1990s, upper-income families accumulated massive new wealth through capital gains in the stock market. Meanwhile, most low- and middle- income families experienced the opposite: Pinched by stagnant real wages and rising living costs, they were able to save less and began borrowing to make ends meet.

The new decade brought recession, rising unemployment, and state funding cuts - a triple whammy for the already struggling middle-class. Average income families are routinely using credit cards as a safety net. They use credit when a breadwinner loses a job - which has happened more than three million times in the last 30 months - or when illness strikes and there are high deductibles, or for the 41 million Americans without medical insurance, full medical bills to pay.

from Credit Cards fuel American Prosperity by Tamara Draut

"Who says redistribution of wealth is un-American? We just do it the wrong way around."
-- James Gill, New Orleans Times-Picayune, Sept. 12, 2003